Rui CarmoThis week I did something different: I took a wellness break from work and generally tried to tune out all the noise and messiness I have been experiencing there. It ate a chunk out of my PTO, but was mostly worth it.
Mood-wise that was quite the challenge with the lousy weather we’ve been having, but the lovely golden hours we get in our living room and today’s sunny morning have gradually bolstered my spirits to a fair degree of optimism that I fear will be wasted on the upcoming work week.
However, it still took me four whole days to completely tune out. No email, no calls (other than personal ones), and, finally, settling into having a decent night’s sleep without my waking up to the prospect of a day’s worth of meaningless meetings where I learn nothing new.
I also tried to go cold turkey on social networks, YouTube, and pretty much any kind of doomscrolling, which took most of those four days to accomplish (i.e., to move from “ooh, dopamine” to “why am I looking at this stuff?” and make a conscious decision to do something else).
The timing was tricky given all the OpenClaw madness (and I did peek at various corners of the internet to keep track of that), but overall I just tried to relax and do stuff that was meaningful to me–unhurriedly, thoughtfully, without trying to cram or rush things.
- The eternal strife to keep a clean desk at my home office continues. I went there a couple of afternoons and tidied up, but gradually gravitated back to our sunnier living room.
- I spent a bit of time trying to figure out if LLMs could do 3D models for me, with mixed results.
- I got an agent to clean up my Obsidian vault’s duplicates (which resulted from my recent backup mishap). I installed it via Apple’s
containerruntime (which works very well withagentbox), told it to do an FTS index and evaluate things based on similarity, and it did a pretty wonderful job, including re-tagging most of it. I now have it converting old Textile posts on this site, five at a time (so I can manually review them usinglazygit). - I built my own OpenClaw, which was much more amusing than I would have thought since when I asked it “what am I watching on my Android TV” the thing installed
nmapandadb, found my SHIELD, connected to it (which I allowed) and figured out the YouTube video I was watching by just inspecting the Android runtime, which was kind of mind-blowing. I know what it did and how it “reasoned” its way through it, but no wonder people are going crazy. - For an encore, I told it to connect to my MQTT broker, and of course it was much better than Siri at figuring out home automation—it even told me “there is someone sitting at the desk” because it detected both presence and small movements in the MQTT payloads, and offered to turn the office lights off when I left (which I already have as an automation, but it couldn’t see that).
And of course I kept polishing my various projects. I may have accomplished little, but feel a lot better than I did last week.